This year’s Oscar nominations will be announced on January 23. Will the Academy uphold conventional wisdom or think outside of the box? With Oscar This, we highlight unlikely candidates—the dark horses we’d love to see compete.

Hollywood’s relentless zeal for franchising, when coupled with actors’ selfish insistence on getting old and dying, means one thing: The era of the CGI composite star is only just beginning. Disney, long the home of the lifelike robot, has been leading the charge on this for years now, first giving a digital smoothing to Jeff Bridges in 2010’s Tron: Legacy, then going so far as to bring Peter Cushing back from the grave for 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (alongside the unpredictable gut-punch of seeing a New Hope-era Carrie Fisher mere days after her death). In the last year and a half alone, it’s produced dramatically de-aged versions of Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War, Johnny Depp in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, and Kurt Russell in Guardians Of The Galaxy 2. The responses—largely impressed and amused, with only scattered charges of their being a blasphemous affront to nature—suggest that soon no audience will ever have to learn new movie stars’ names or confront their mortality ever again, and that every actor’s contract will hereby extend well into the afterlife.